Costly Mistakes
by dk-joy
Summary: Duo comes back from a mission different. The boys find out what happened and are horrified. Blood, language, other warnings inside.
1. Costly Mistakes

Ha, ha! Another one-shot that ends with a cliffie from me! Sorry, but I can't think of how to end it, so…oh wait…I did have an idea for how to continue this, but I'm not sure I want to. If you would like me to, please tell me. It will probably be a while, though.

Warnings and disclaimer: I don't own Gundam Wing or the characters, I just like torturing Duo. (Sorry!) This fic has mentions of torture, accidental killings of hundreds of people, blood, language, a quiet Duo (beware!), traumatized Duo…what else…implied shonen ai (if ya want to read into it)…it's not too bad…just read it, please!

Costly Mistakes 

The boy in black walked slowly down the hall. His boots didn't make a sound. Even his braid seemed subdued and quiet, barely moving with his steps. His violet eyes stared straight ahead. His expression was one of cold concentration. Duo wasn't smiling.

The other four Gundam pilots could only stare in confusion at the silent, serious boy. They took in his dull, flat eyes and his slow, deliberate steps. Worst of all was his mouth: a thin, grim line had replaced the normal relaxed grin.

"Duo…" Quatre started, then stopped when the boy didn't even twitch – just walked on in that horribly silent way. Quatre closed his eyes and reached out with his space heart.

Trowa caught the boy before his chair hit the ground. Quatre had flinched violently when he had tried to touch the other boy's mind.

"He blocked me. Totally. I can't even feel him. It's like he's…" a shiver stopped him from completing the thought. Quatre flinched again at the barely audible click of Duo's door closing.

"He's shut himself off. This isn't like Duo." Trowa said.

"Hn. Probably failed his mission" Wufei said with contempt.

click click

"No. He did not." Heero said, staring at his laptop.

Wufei moved toward him to look, but Heero closed it and looked at him silently.

"Well! What happened then!" Wufei exclaimed.

"Maybe you'll find out later."

Heero stood and brought his laptop toward his room. Then he stopped and went to Duo's instead.

The other three pilots jumped when Heero dropped his laptop. He went into Duo's room and dragged the silently struggling boy out.

"Get a first aid kit ready," Heero said calmly, ignoring Duo's attempts to escape. Quatre took one look at Duo's bare, bloodly torso and ran to find it. Trowa and Wufei cleared a space on the couch while Heero pulled Duo into the living room.

Even the stoic Heero flinched at Duo's first words.

"I just killed 600 civilians! Don't I fucking deserve to die! Why didn't I just let OZ kill me?" Duo finally stopped struggling and emotions flooded his face. Quatre screamed at the intense feelings – grief, anger, self-hatred, pain – he sensed from the boy.

"No wonder he shut himself off." Trowa observed quietly.

"We all make mistakes…" Wufei started.

"Not 571 at once! 201 children, 237 women, and 133 men. The only thing they did wrong was…no. They didn't do anything to deserve it. They were just there when Death came." Duo seemed calmer for a minute, then he pulled the wrist Quatre had been bandaging away and scratched the newly formed scab off. He wiped the blood onto his other hand and rubbed it on his face, hands, arm and chest.

The other boys stood still a moment in astonishment, then hurriedly restrained the blood-covered boy.

"That's enough, Duo." Heero said quietly, sickened by his friend's behavior.

"Enough? Enough! It will never be enough! I could be bled dry a thousand times and it would still not be enough! I spilled so much of those people's blood that I could bathe in it for weeks. Nothing I do will ever be enough to fix this."

Duo went still again, but the other boys stayed tense and ready to restrain him if necessary. Quatre went back to bandaging his wrists. When he was done, Heero grabbed Duo and flung him onto the couch stomach-first.

"I'll get his back," he said after seeing Quatre close his eyes and swallow.

"Maxwell! What did you do to yourself!" Wufei yelled.

"What? I didn't do that! Those OZ bast…I'm as bad as them now, aren't I? At least they never blew up 600 people in one shot…"

Heero didn't say anything as he cleaned the network of bloody slashes on Duo's back.

"Duo…are you crying," he asked when he felt the boy's body shuddering and heard him gasping.

"…can't…breathe…"

"Shit!" Heero said, pulling the boy and sitting him down on the couch. He could see dark bruises caused by booted feet connecting with bony flesh on his friend's sides. As Duo gasped for air, Heero gently felt his friend's sides.

"Hmm…at least three broken, several fractured," he said as he ran his hands over Duo's ribs.

"Did any puncture a lung?" he asked. Duo answered by coughing slightly, letting blood drip down his chin. Wufei cursed quietly in Chinese.

"We're going to need to bring him to the hospitol." Trowa whispered.

Owari? TBC? You decide…

Author's Note: Well…I could continue it. I would go into Duo's past. I'm gonna say that he met Sally at one point and he was hurt enough then that she's surprised he's still alive. Of course she won't realize that he's the same person until…well…if ya wanna find out, review!


	2. Sally Remembers

Warnings and disclaimer: I don't own Gundam Wing or the characters, I just like torturing Duo. (Sorry!) This fic has mentions of torture, accidental killings of hundreds of people, blood, language, a quiet Duo (beware!), traumatized Duo, past NCS, child abuse…what else…implied shonen ai (if ya want to read into it)…it's not too bad…just read it, please!

Costly Mistakes: Sally Remembers 

Sally never thought she would see the boy again. She also never would have thought the boy would grow up to be Duo Maxwell, pilot of the Gundam Deathscythe, a boy who knew the costs of war and wished so strongly for peace at the tender age of 15. But then again, he had known the cost of war before this one had even started. She knew. She remembered. She just never would have guessed he was that little boy. The one that made her want to go to medical school instead of becoming just a regular soldier.

_I know it wasn't another boy_

But here he was, in the same position she had first seen him in. Sprawled out, torso bare, four friends hurrying toward her to ask for her help. But this time he was on a gurney, not in a deserted shopping cart, and his friends were fellow Gundam pilots, not fellow street rats.

I know it wasn't another boy 

His eyes were shut tightly, moving rapidly. He didn't look conscious.

I know it wasn't another boy 

She could tell his wrists had been slit because of the bloody bandages.

_It must have been a man._

He was covered in blood, bruised, breathing only with difficulty…probably a punctured lung.

The burn is dark and deep, my son 

But as she saw all of this, she didn't at first take note of a scar.

The burn is dark and deep 

When she finally saw it, she shuddered at the memories the faint scar forced her to remember.

A black and red horned devil, my son 

A smiling, leering image of the devil burned into a small boy's stomach, bleeding profusely.

_It'll be a scar to keep._

It didn't surprise her that she remembered it after all this time. Ten years wasn't so long really…

"What did you give him? He's bleeding all over the place! Please don't tell me you knocked him out with some kind of pain medicine! Those have blood thinners in them!" Sally yelled, not bothering with the niceties.

The boys paled and Trowa answered for them, "He was putting up a fight. We had to find a way to get him here, and we didn't have any sedatives. We figured hitting him on the head would have been a bad idea, seeing as he's already bleeding so much and he has such a hard head."

_He's babbling. That's strange…_thought Sally. _Probably a mild case of shock._

"How much did you give him?" she asked, checking his pulse (weak) and listening to his chest (liquid in his lungs, probably blood).

"Ten times the recommended dosage." Heero said shortly, then added after a heated glare from Sally, "we had to make sure he would fall asleep and stay asleep. And he's resistant to most drugs – we had to give him so much just to make it work."

Sally's glare softened, since she knew the boys were only trying to help their friend, but she was still pissed.

"Well he needs a blood transfusion and there's no blood here, so you better pray that one of you has the right blood type, or he's gonna die!"

The boys looked suitably worried and scrambled to bring Duo into the tent that Sally was using to take care of the sick and wounded. They found an empty bed and hurriedly placed him there before rolling up their sleeves so Sally could take blood samples to see who, if anyone, matched Duo's blood type.

With the advanced technology available even in field hospitals, she was able to determine all of their blood types within a few minutes. Duo was O positive, so he could only accept O blood. Heero and Wufei were the only ones who could donate to him.

"I'll need double the normal amount from each of you. And he's bleeding too much for me to waste time to take it from you and fix him up at the same time, so I need Quatre and Trowa to take your blood while I get started on Duo." Sally said in a rush. The boys all nodded and hurried to do her bidding.

Sally immediately pulled out a set of operating tools to work on Duo's lung. The boys almost ran out of the tent when they saw her start to cut into their friend's chest, not bothering to give him anymore pain medicine. (We'll leave her to it so as not to bother her, shall we?)

The boys set up six chairs, two each for Heero and Wufei, outside of the tent. They set to work extracting two bags of blood from each of the Asian boys. They tried not to think of what would happen if the surgery didn't work out. Or if the surgery worked but Duo's wounds got infected. Or if Duo woke up in the middle of surgery…

"Oh, Allah! There's just too much that could happen! He could die any number of ways and we can't do anything! What will we do!" Quatre wailed.

"You just answered your own question, Quatre. We can't do anything, so we'll just…" Trowa started, "…do what Sally says." He finished lamely.

"All we can do is get this blood to Sally and hope nothing goes wrong." Heero said quietly.

"Injustice! We are Gundam pilots! Why can't we do more?" Wufei exclaimed.

"…because…I'm here and I'm just fine?" Duo said faintly. The boys whipped around to see the subject of their conversation leaning against a gurney weakly, blood dripping down his arms and chest. They could only stare.

"Duo Maxwell! Get your ass back in here! What are you doing? You barely have any blood left and you're dripping that little bit onto the floor!"

Duo turned toward her slowly. "I'm fine…I can walk and everything. Can't I just go back to the safe house?" he whined. Then he started to fall.

The boys finally stopped staring and moved. Heero scooped Duo up, while Trowa and Quatre grabbed the bags of blood and Wufei started ranting.

"What do you think you're doing, Maxwell! Get back to bed! You're going to die if you don't stop…"

"I've had worse, haven't I, Sally?" he grinned at the young woman knowingly.

"You knew? You remembered and you never told me before now?" Sally yelled, outraged.

"Knew what?" Heero asked quietly, but in a voice that no one wanted to argue with.

TBC…

Author's Note: I'll write at least one more chapter for this. It'll be about Sally remembering what happened to Duo (cause the scar wasn't the only thing that happened!)


End file.
